Fiddler Crab Review

Fiddler Crab Review has been writing chapbook reviews for over a year.  They've reviewed a few of the Cherry Pie chapbooks. 

Their reviews cover a vast range of small presses, and the reviewers are varied in background.  It makes for an exciting mix.  The reviews have gotten better over the last year, so that often now I find the review is at least as interesting as the poems. 

Laurie Rosenblatt's recent review of Edge by Edge from Toadlily Press is exactly that kind of review -- interesting, fair, with a good sense of what the poems are about, and (this is the good part) giving specific examples of what works and what does not, and why.  I found myself stepping back every few paragraphs, remembering one of my own poems where I'd done exactly what she was faulting in the poem she was reviewing.  Hmmm. . .  Her examples, and her insights on what works and why, and where the poems fall short, are all spot-on.  For the price of a review (free, in this case!), you also get a mini-writing lesson, and a very good one.

Review: Fear, by Pamela Garvey

A review I wrote of Pamela Garvey's chapbook Fear, out from Finishing Line Press, is posted at RATTLE. Read the review here.
Fear was a finalist for the New Women's Voices Competition, and is available at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, and also at Amazon. Garvey lives in St. Louis, where she has long been appreciated for co-founding Words on Purpose, a group of socially concerned writers who organize benefit readings.

Cherry Pie chapbooks on Fiddler Crab Review

Two of the Cherry Pie chapbooks have been reviews on Fiddler Crab Review's website. Niki Nymark's A Stranger Here Myself, and Donna Biffar's Kiss Me Cold, were reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer, who has been an editor at Harvard University Press and has published a poetry chapbook through Finishing Line Press.

The Fiddler Crab website / blog is a great resource for seeing the range of what's available in poetry chapbooks. It's a new venture, and full of energy -- see it here: http://fiddlercrabreview.blogspot.com/.

Weaving the Light: review and launch

Mary Ruth Donnelly's Weaving the Light has drawn the attention of Midwest Book Review, which notes it is "a strong pick for those looking for women's poetry with a Midwestern flavor" and that its appearance is yet one more entry "into the fine Midwest Women Poets series."

Read the review here: http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/apr_09.htm#poet

This seems a good occasion for a look back at the book launch event held in early March for Weaving the Light. Rick Spencer provided an introduction to the full house at the event. Rick, formerly part of the notable (and, regrettably, no longer published) Delmar Magazine, now teaches philosophy at Southwestern Illinois College. He's given permission to republish here his remarks introducing Mary Ruth Donnelly’s readings from Weaving the Light:

I don’t know why Mary Ruth has such a love for landscape: why she is drawn to riverbanks and plains, the cup-like hollow of a garden, the shape of a road in the hills. But she is. Perhaps it was her upbringing in Kansas City—another river city—a city near the Great Plains? Maybe it is some spatial gene she inherited from ancestors whose lives were all too influenced by the horizon? Nevertheless, it is a theme in her writing: both her prose and her poetry. Her sensitivity to the land lets her see patterns of landscape in film and literature. In poetry, it pushes the levee into the title and the mountain into the metaphor.

I do know why she writes of painful things, of loss, of tears. Poetry is one of the natural habitats for tragedy. In its environment, lamentation is never likely to become an endangered species. But, for an eye sensitive to landscape, poetry becomes more than a place to enshrine that bitter moment we can’t forget. It becomes the place to show us the truth of our losses: the fragility of this life, the vulnerability of us all, the mystery of fate, and the miracle of our carrying on.

While there are many other themes in her book, these two, landscape and loss, standout. Sure, there are trees and women, museums and mammals, art and architecture. However, I am captivated by the beauty of these two.

Then again, I, too, am entranced by the mountains, and made humble by the sky over the plains. I, too, attend to the lessons of my loss, the sacred truths inside of sadness.

It is a wonderful book. Some of the poems I witnessed as the driver, or navigator, of a car in a storm. Other poems are from places I don’t know. Still, they are as familiar as my own home, with its porch light and peeling paint—a welcome banner to me alone. This is to say these poems speak to me. I think they will speak to you as well.


Thank you Rick. Well said.

Nan Sweet featured in Walter Bargen's column

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured Nan Sweet in a recent column by Missouri poet laureate Walter Bargen. He picked Pipeliners' Picnic, one of her poems from her Cherry Pie Press chapbook, Rotogravure, to discuss in his regular column on Missouri poets.

A review in RATTLE

Niki Nymark's chapbook, A Stranger Here Myself, has been reviewed at RATTLE. Read it here: http://www.rattle.com/blog/2009/03/a-stranger-here-myself-by-niki-nymark/.

From the editor

A little news from the editorial seat...

I have a review published in RATTLE -- http://www.rattle.com/blog/2009/01/alabama-steve-by-karyna-mcglynn/.

And a poem in a new online publication, Sweet, that has a very attractive website and a sweet tooth to boot. Check it out at http://www.sweetlit.com/, or to see my poem go directly here: http://www.sweetlit.com/Rebecca_Ellis.html.

Rotogravure - Nanora Sweet reviewed

Nan Sweet's Rotogravure has been reviewed by Stephen C. Behrendt in the Winter 2008 issue of Prairie Schooner. Behrendt generously lets the poems do most of the talking, observing that Sweet's chapbook is "big with histories and memories." He quotes from one of my own favorites, "Council Grove," and says ". . .what fascinates Sweet [is] that barely definable 'power' that infuses and moves the world, carrying with it the sheer animal force of history that inhabits all places, all things."

The recent issue of Prairie Schooner is available locally at Left Bank Books (where you can also pick up a copy of Nan Sweet's Rotogravure!), or order from the Prairie Schooner website.

A Stranger Here Myself - reviewed in St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Niki Nymark's chapbook garnered a review by Robert Boyd in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Boyd is familiar with Nymark's work, and in this review of "interesting and expert work by poets who matter" he notes she is "in command of her medium in A Stranger Here Myself." Read the review here: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/reviews.nsf/book/story/001E391C3CD860B5862574EC007573E6?OpenDocument

A Stranger Here Myself - more kudos!

Niki Nymark's A Stranger Here Myself has received a strong review from the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the St. Louis Jewish Light, Robert Cohn. The reviewer notes - "With bold brush strokes, sharply visible lines and vivid colors, Nymark is a modernist poet of the first rank, and her collection, A Stranger Here Myself, should have a place on the shelf of any serious reader of excellent poetry."

Read it here: http://www.stljewishlight.com/news/308232295667923.php.

The Urge to Believe - noted by Left Bank Books

Left Bank Books has picked The Urge to Believe is Stronger than Belief Itself as a 'recommended pick' in its July newsletter. A short review by Left Bank staff member Erin Quick:

St. Louis poet Erin M. Bertram's latest chapbook, The Urge to Believe is Stronger than Belief Itself, is a collection of prose poems grounded in the experience of dealing with cancer--namely breast cancer, though it largely goes unnamed in the book. With a daughter's kind, eager eye, she looks at what safety can be found in a name, gleaned from the seeming order of definition (whether from a dictionary or medical pamphlet) even when faced with the treachery of meaning. From the opening lines of Rilke to the book's final words, the solid actuality of language belies our frankly human experience of loss and its echo, pain. In such a world, where we are always reaching, even our mother's breasts bear the fragility of existence. In such a world, "any change is worth noting."

Review -- In Mi'kmaq Country

In Mi'kmaq Country: Selected Poems & Stories is a new book by Alice M. Azure. I was delighted to be gifted a review copy from Alice, who is a solid and enlightening presence in two of the local writing groups I participate in.

Alice Azure's poems have previously appeared in publications such as Shenandoah, The Cream City Review, and Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: An Anthology of the American Indian Holocaust. I'm excited to see her work now collected in her own book.

I'll excerpt two poems that I think convey the flavor and some of the range in her book.

Northwoods Haiku

Spring was cold that year,
the trillium wouldn't open.
Then you came to me.

Gisoolg

...is a verb, an action. When we say "Gisoolg," it means that you have been created, and you are being created. Stephen Augustine, Mi'kmaq Elder

listen
listen
a voice
pulses above
above in the stars
they pulse
clear
like the voice
early early
this winter day
listen listen
Paradise pulses
participates
Paradise participates
at times
times
times like this
participates
with thee
thee
listen
thee listen
Paradise participates
pulses
for thee
listen listen listen
thee listen
participates
with thee

The book is beautifully produced by Albatross Press, with a striking woodcut by the author as the cover image. It is available locally from Left Bank Books, which is always glad to handle mail orders, and is also available from the author (speelya@aol.com).

The Permeability of Memory, by Helen Eisen - Review

Helen Eisen's chapbook, The Permeability of Memory, has received a strong review from Patricia Prime at New Hope International. Prime says the collection has "one outstanding poem after another" and "the pleasure of reading this collection extends beyond the discovery of individual poems. It's an accumulative experience, based on the pleasant sense that the next poem could take you anywhere."

Read the review at: http://www.geraldengland.co.uk/revs/bs324.htm.

Helen Eisen's The Permeability of Memory (ISBN 978-0-9748468-4-2) is available locally in St. Louis at Left Bank Books, or send an email requesting an order form to cherrypiepress@yahoo.com. The chapbook is temporarily sold out, and a new print run will be available by the end of August.

Gilgamesh by Derrek Hines

In bringing the epic of Gilgamesh to us, Derrek Hines says he "added material in an effort to recapture for the modern reader some of the vigour and excitement the original audience must have felt."

By golly he certainly has, and it's wonderful. He's turned what was essentially an oral poem-epic into something crisp that chirrs and whizzes in your ears if you read it aloud, and also sits comfortably and tightly on the page.

Here's how he starts off:

Here is Gilgamesh, king of Uruk:
two-thirds divine, a mummy's boy,
zeppelin ego, cock like a trip-hammer,
and solid chrome, no-prisoners arrogance.

Pulls women like beer rings.
Grunts when puzzled.
A bully. A jock. Perfecto. But in love? --
a moon-calf, and worse, thoughtful.

The words tumble and hop with energy. The language is tight, with turns that alternate between dry humour ("Pulls women like beer rings.") and the strung-out and character-revealing ending to both these stanzas. This Gilgamesh is immediate and fully present, both mythic and real.

Hines can get beautifully and evocatively lyrical without losing any of the compression and energy that makes this stuff zing. Here is a brief passage between descriptions of two very different sexual encounters.

Soft-mouthed as a gun dog
dark retrieves these few sounds:
a clatter of supper plates,
the dry thresh, like a woman's stockings,
of palm fronds,

the rustle of moonlight, rinsing itself
up to its wrists in the river.

What Hines is so good at is ratcheting up the energy by presenting an image that is intensely palpable ("Soft-mouthed as a gun dog") or visually specific ("zeppelin ego") and then bringing you to a full stop with either a slow-down of the rhythm ("and solid chrome, no-prisoners arrogance.") or an image that, with light repeated vowels, literally immerses itself, but only so far, then stops ("moonlight, rinsing itself / up to its wrists in the river.").

Beautiful stuff.


Gilgamesh, by Derrek Hines

Poems you gotta read: Frannie Lindsay, Catherine Rankovic

My favorite recent find is Lamb, by Frannie Lindsay. It's just out from Perugia Press, an excellent press with a good track record. I liked one of their earlier books, Red by Melanie Braverman, and I like the breadth of the press's taste, evidenced in the selections they print from year to year. Perugia's books are carefully (and fairly) selected, and beautifully printed. But I digress...

Lamb is deeply elegant, gorgeously crafted, and at once both painful and redeeming. Lindsay's poems about father and daughter and the violation of borders are difficult to read because they are brutally honest -- yes, that is exactly the way it is, yes you do have to look at it. They are compelling -- you can't stop reading -- not because of the subject matter but because they are damned fine poems. Lindsay's special grace is that she doesn't stop at blame and anger, but instead circles round with a hard-won compassion for a father who, finally, is brought down by age and sickness. Instead of forgiveness, there's compassion.

Each poem has a stunning detail or two that made me feel I was holding the poem in my hands, not just reading it.

Drinking Hour

He has trouble getting his fingers to curl
around the stem, for he has not had wine
in over a year, not any, and now
there's a table right here where his glass
can rest between sips of ordinary merlot,
and I have steadied him,
bone by bone, into the family's
oldest chair. And he blinks his lips
the way the skinny kitten, a feral, blinked
its eyes when I gave it the antibiotic and water
through a dropper, one tear at a time.

Most of Lindsay's poems are fully felt, fully rendered, and so multi-faceted in their understanding of the inevitable, the guilty, the loved. Here is the ending to a poem about -- at least on one level -- a horse whose last day has come:

...And the mare,
who stands hour by hour in her stall
like a fire-damaged piano
knows all

about frost on the hay,
the achy barn door that reached
as far as it could every single day
with willingness, leading the same
enormous morning in.

I do love these poems. I hope Frannie Lindsay writes many, many more of them. There is instruction in these poems for what makes us human, and they are rich with love and surprise. I can't resist quoting just one more...

Clean

She stood in the tub beside me again
a little slouched over her workaday belly

teaching me how a grown-up girl
must always clean herself:

she made a paw of her washcloth
and rubbed it back and forth inside,

she had me try it too in front of her;
then she helped me climb out

and dried me until I could stop
my shivering; she folded my peach-

colored towel over hers

I leave the poem instructed by where she puts full stops, simple commas, line breaks, enjambments. These are poems I'll go back to many times.


Next on my list of favorites is a writer local to St. Louis. Fierce Consent and Other Poems by Catherine Rankovic (WingSpan Press) is fierce, funny, quirky, and individual. Reading her poems, you walk, jerk-step, through her life and (if you're a writer too) your own. Her poems are not contained easily, and many reach out and grab the reader either through direct address (to the "Reader") or through a no-holds-barred wrestling match in which language and destiny battle it out. (Rest assured, language comes out the winner.)

How many writers will feel themselves caught in the heat-waves of this encounter:

...She went to hear a poet, and afterward went
up to him, said she wrote poetry, too, O
fatal youthful idiocy.
He'd nothing to say to a female
trembling with destiny, underage
and looked it, but "Run along, little girl."
God's good; she never heard nor read his name again.

God, interestingly, makes several appearances in these poems. He's one of the most interesting stage characters yet:

When two people love each other,
God rejoices, and settles back.
This is fun,
this is the kind of thing He works for.
He calls for beer and popcorn,
has tissues there for the tender scene,
cheers for the one who's wrong in the argument,
is amazed what they've made chocolate mean,
and only in their bitterness
or resignation suggests He's there,
but He can never have a kiss, His mom
never made Him wear idiot mittens,
He has no grandfather; His exquisitest
roses stay unboxed exactly where they are.

Rankovic's reach is wide and probing, and crushingly close to the bone when she looks closely at the life around her. Here's this one, witnessing a crowd leaving a bus:

These are God's people also, spilling from the bus,
their pink polyester clothing edged
with dirt as with rust, and bow-legged, bow-backed,
permed unprettily, at home a skirted sink
serving as a vanity, the white-trash hordes
of upstate and outstate as I'm white trash from Wisconsin.
Their hunger, if not literal, is for a crude,
accessible beauty, the protractor's
French curve, the velvet painting, gold-
toned base metals, a caesura in the pain of living ...

My favorite poem, and one that, after the preceding self-mocking fandangoes and delicious belly dances echoing the tone and language of everyone from Berryman to e.e. cummings, succeeds in bringing me to my knees, is The Shadow. It's appropriately placed as the penultimate poem, uncovering a hard-won understanding of the thin and temporary -- and mocking -- victory of the artist's "fierce consent" to achieve something in this world. In this poem, Rankovic knows her shadow well -- but not quite as well as it knows her:

...I am cobalt blue; gray in sunlight;

no one else when knelt to
kneels to you. I am closer than anyone on your pillow

and always you lay your cheek on mine....

Assigned to you, to dog you
with what your body does, to double your crimes, to lie about your figure,

to flatter you and to counterbalance radiance...

These poems are tender, fierce, courageous and well-honed, alternately mad as hell and funny as hell. If this is where poetry is going, we may be ok after all.

Finding Jane Kenyon at last

Finding Jane Kenyon at last

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. Jane Kenyon, Graywolf. 1996.


I avoided Jane Kenyon for a long time, and it wasn't her fault. I skirted the nearly cultish admiration that followed her death, mistrusting it. There's so much baggage there -- cancer, early death, marriage to Donald Hall, a great poet in his own right. What hope was there for the poems, standing alone without all that context? It doesn't take more than a few personal losses and a few experienced or observed illnesses to drive a reader to madness, either obsessively seeking out or obsessively avoiding those little pockets of the poetry world that feed on the same.

Well, it's been over ten years, time enough for me to get over it. No point in rejecting outright, without examination, someone's entire body of work simply because I'm worn out (who isn't?) with a world of sickness and death.

And so, dear Reader, I read the poems. Like the fabled plums in the refrigerator, consumed in the privacy of a dark and empty kitchen, they were delicious.

It's too bad they're surrounded by that circumference of death and admiration. This collection even has a lovely and respectful afterword by Donald Hall, tying a knot in that string. It's good to have the information about how the poems were pulled together, and how much of the arrangement was Jane Kenyon's own doing. And it is a beautiful thing to see so intimately inside a marriage of both minds and hearts -- how difficult is it to weather a marriage where both people have the same ambitions and the arena is small, and how much more difficult to weather the losses of this physical life. The baggage is beautiful, and fine leather, but still it is . . . baggage. I may be overly sensitive to the idea of attaching such baggage to women's poetry. Lots of excellent men poets have their own baggage that is well known and forms some kind of circle around their work -- the world of poetry has its share of illness, bad marriages, suicides. But usually with men poets, the work stands alone in terms of how it is published. The myths and suitcases accompany, but in separate containers. Why is it that Berryman, for example, can be suicidal and clinically depressed and his poems are great (nonetheless) but with Plath, Sexton and now Kenyon one is left wondering if the poems depend on the baggage? (They shouldn't -- the poems are absolutely able to stand on their own. The fact that we won't let them says more about how women are read than about how women write.) It's hard to find Plath-Sexton-Kenyon published without some reference to the baggage accompanying, in the same vehicle (foreword, afterword, etc.).

Willa Cather was right to order all her letters burned. If she was depressed or distraught, we'll never know, and we'll read her as gladly as ever.

So, I'm sorry to have avoided Jane Kenyon all this time, but I had good reason. And I'm glad to have gotten over it, because her poems are very good.

She has a lovely sense of structure, with sounds and near-rhymes accumulating. She uses structures that I can tell she's crafted carefully, but that usually are not a "traditional" or received structure. The positioning of the near-rhymes and line breaks is carefully different, except in rare cases where the end rhymes fall happily in tow, usually at the end of a stanza. The poems read beautifully aloud.

Drink, Eat, Sleep

I never drink from his blue tin cup
speckled with white
without thinking of stars on a clear,
cold night -- of Venus blazing low
over the leafless trees; and Canis
great and small -- dogs without flesh,
fur, blood, or bone . . . dogs made of light,
apparitions of cold light, with black
and trackless spaces in between. . . .
The angel gave a little book
to the prophet, telling him to eat --
eat and tell of the end of time.
Strange food, infinitely strange,
but the pages were like honey
to his tongue. . . .


At the Summer Solstice

Noon heat. And later, hotter still. . . .
The neighbor's son rides up and down the field
turning the hay -- turning it with flourishes.

The tractor dips into the low clovery place
where melt from the mountain
comes down in the spring, and wild
lupine grows. Only the boy's blond head
can be seen; but then he comes smartly
up again -- to whirl, deft, around
the pear tree near the barn. Brave . . .

bravissimo. The tall grass lies -- cut,
turned, raked, and dry. Later his father
comes down the lane with the baler. I hear
the steady thumping all afternoon.

So hot, so hot today. . . . I will stay in our room
with the shades drawn, waiting for you
to come with sleepy eyes, and pass your fingers
lightly, lightly up my thighs.



This is just the first two stanzas from Twilight: After Haying

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)